TRAUTMANN WINS AT ARAGON; ALT STEALS TITLE!

29.09.2012
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Germany’s Florian Alt seized the 2012 Red Bull MotoGP Rookies Cup title with a comfortable third place finish in the penultimate round of the championship in Aragon, Spain in a race won by Austria’s Lukas Trautmann. Marcos Ramirez of Spain was second.

Alt’s battle for the title was made easier when both of the other contenders, Dutch rider Scott Deroue and Germany’s Philipp Oettl both slid off the track. Unluckiest rider was 15-year-old Belgian Livio Loi who had worked his way through the pack. He overcame a clash with 16 year old Japanese Yui Watanabe that dropped him to 15th, fought his way to the lead and went onto the last lap with over two seconds on Trautmann only to have his bike roll to a halt at the first corner with an electrical fault.

That left Trautmann with just over a second’s lead but not enough for a comfort zone. “I had been looking at the big screens through the race and I knew that there was a big pack there. Bad luck to Livio, I don't know what happened to his bike but I could see the others were right with me going onto the last lap.”

Ramirez, one of the few to had been on the Aragon before, had set off from the middle of the front row into an early lead while the others struggled to get used to a track that they had only experienced in the wet. Trautmann went on the attack and brought a train of riders with him in pursuit that ended in a pack of around 15 riders all out for the win. That was broken up when last year’s champion, Lorenzo Baldassarri went out in lap six, bringing Oettel down with him. Neither rider was hurt.

Deroue had been a slow qualifier but as usual made his presence felt at the end of the race to be in fifth with just Ramirez between him and third placed Alt. But Deroue, hungry for the title pushed too hard and exited in the final lap.

The season for this competition four young riders all on KTM 125 RR bikes concludes on Sunday on the MotoGP circuit at Aragon.